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Reference number

SM Adam volume 46/47

Purpose

[6] Design for the first storey of a house, c1774

Aspect

Plan of the first storey of a three-bay house, with the front room forming a double-height drawing room. A plan of a compartmental ceiling is shown, ornamented with a central figurative roundel enclosed within a fan. This is encircled by a further roundel bordered with fluting and paterae, and with cameos beyond. The central compartment is flanked by further compartments containing lozenges enclosing figurative ovals all bordered by festoons and cameos, and cartouches flanked by reclining figures and enclosed within semi-circular bands. Each corner is ornamented with additional cameos flanked by swags. Beyond the drawing room there is the principal staircase, an additional staircase and a small rectangular room, with a ceiling ornamented with wreaths and crossed bands of calyx, and this links to an apsidal ended room at the rear. This room has a plan of a ceiling, which is ornamented with a central roundel enclosed within a fan, bordered by festoons and cameos. Beyond this socles support winged sphinxes, and the ceiling corners are ornamented with quarter-fans. This room links to a circular boudoir, which forms the central bow at the rear of the house, and this leads to a bedchamber beyond. Narrow advances in the end bays contain water closets

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Henry Drummond Esqr (in the hand of William Adam) / Principal Story / 14 (pencil) / Boudoir 9 1/2 Diam / Lady Elizabeths Bedchamber and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c1774
    c1774

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including Naples yellow and pink within a single ruled border on laid paper (300 x 467)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison, with part title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Notes

King notes the extended height of the ceiling for the front drawing, and suggests that combined with the preliminary design shown here, Adam would have likely introduced a segmental vault.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 37
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 97, pl. 99
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).